[Cwgrad-announcements] Interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed re: Creative Writing programs

[rrussin at ucr.edu]

I won't copy the whole thing here, but a few paragraphs in case you want to check it out:

By JENNIFER HOWARD

Complaints about writing programs are legion. Critics — there have been many over the years — tend to reach for sausage-factory imagery to sum up their objections. Stuff raw writing into one end, they say, and out the other comes a string of literary product in whatever shape happens to be in fashion. In the 1980s, for instance, minimalism à la Raymond Carver was all the rage, and writers who emerged from M.F.A. programs were often accused of being Carver wannabes. Even those who look with toleration on writing programs tend to believe that you can teach writers but you can't teach people how to write, as the saying goes.

Enter Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles. McGurl comes to the defense of writing programs from an unexpected angle: the literary critic's corner. His new book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press), makes a claim that is likely to surprise people on both sides of the debate: "This book argues that the rise of the creative-writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history," he writes in the very first sentence.

...

Colleagues with Ph.D.'s now come to her asking for advice on how to make their nonfiction work more creative, while she and others on the creative side have grown comfortable publishing more academic papers, in part because they too must satisfy tenure requirements. "Everybody's influencing everybody else," Pollack reports. In graduate classes, "there's a lot of mingling going on" between critics and creative writers.

If McGurl is living proof that a literary critic — "a museless pedant," as he jokingly says in The Program Era — can treat creative-writing programs with respect, even admiration, is the world ready to set aside the sausage-factory debate? The university may be the best place to move that conversation forward. Writing and publishing have grown decentralized as the power of New York wanes. Pollack hopes that more people will give creative-writing programs credit for "keeping the flame alive a little bit" and back off the attack. "How can it hurt the world if there are as many people as possible spending two years reading and writing?" she asks. "What is the harm of that?"

Robin Russin
Associate Professor & Graduate Advisor
Department of Theatre
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
(951) 827-2707
(213) 949-1061 cel
robin.russin at ucr.edu

"Deserve's got nothin' to do with it." - William Munny in "Unforgiven," written by David Webb Peoples